Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm pleased today to be joined by University of Chicago law professor Will Boad, a very young but distinguished law professor at that fine law school at the University of Chicago.

A well-known for his work on the constitutional liquidation, a very interesting topic, and Madison, like a sense of phrase from Madison, is that right?

Yeah.

Which we should have a separate discussion on. And also, maybe more notoriously, seems to have invented the phrase the shadow docket, which Justice Alito got upset about recently, but the way it's been used, not of course about your important scholarly work on it.

But anyway, it will clerk for Chief Justice Roberts and is a leading commentator on many matters of constitutional law and federal courts. But what we're going to talk about today is provoked by a recent piece you wrote, but also by other just by the facts of this by the moment, which is the whole question of the elections and election overturning and threats to democratic elections in this country.

So, well, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me.

And I would say I would not have expected to have this conversation. I've been in Washington a long time, and I've been through transitions of one party losing. I was actually in a White House where we lost after one term in the George H. W. Bush White House.

And I always knew that the system we have for transferring power or for ratifying election results and certifying them and then moving forward to let the new party take power was a little unusual.

Sort of an accretion of different historical and constitutional legal, you know, procedures, but I got to say I never thought a moment about it in all the years I've been here.

I went through one where I remember with being with Vice President Quail and January of 1993 and him getting the, I guess I have to preside now and certify that we lost and that Bill Clinton will become president.

We joked a little bit about not the greatest day of your vice presidency, but of course he went out and did it.

None of us thought of think about what was, you know, what was happening occasionally to be what broke a letter.

And then it turns out we have a system that, well, let you explain what the system we have and the institutions and laws we have, but maybe we should take a minute to talk about what happened.

I mean, in your view, what was sort of just highlights of this very unusual transition we had from November 3rd to January 20th?

Yeah, well, I mean, the most unusual thing about it was that there were a lot of points where it wasn't totally clear it was going to happen.

You know, we have these hardwired dates that, you know, turned out to be a movable, like election day and inauguration day, but between November 30th and January 20th, you know, as you said, a bunch of stuff supposed to happen.

The Electoral College has to meet. There's leads have to be certified, then there's stuff eventually gets to Congress, supposed to count it, supposed to, you know, affirm who it is.

At each stage of the game, there were efforts, you know, sometimes spurred on directly by President Trump, sometimes by sort of other people in the orbit to try to throw something in the gears and see if they could stop it from happening.

So before we get to the, maybe going through the different aspects, different places where things have to happen and could have gone wrong at state level, the executive branch, Congress, the courts.

In general, just sort of top line summary, how alarming is the whole thing to you now that it's more or less over?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's so alarming, I guess I'd say it's alarming. I don't want to be, I don't want to be an alarmist, you know, I don't want to say we almost had a coup in this country.

There were still a lot of things that would have had to happen to go from, you know, senators that represented as objecting to storming the Capitol to get a, you know, to get a full on constitutional crisis or coup.

...